Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Ira Glasser

Monday, September 27 at 12 Noon (Baypoint Ballroom)

Topic: The War on the War on Drugs

Ira Glasser was for much of his adult life the Executive Director of the ACLU and in this capacity became a spokesman for civil rights in general and a thorn in the side of most of the last eight administrations.

Since his retirement from the ACLU in 2001, he has served as Board President of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization dedicated to reversing this nation’s long-standing and ill-considered War on Drugs.

Prior to his affiliation with the ACLU, Mr. Glasser was a mathematician and a member of the science and mathematics faculties of Queens college and Sarah Lawrence College. He was also editor of Current magazine.

“The war on drugs is a civil liberties and constitutional disaster in every way . . . . The tremendous racial disparities make the violation of rights even worse than if they were randomly distributed. And one of the consequences of the war on drugs — since all but four states permanently disenfranchise felons— is that 14 percent of African American males are disenfranchised and up to 30 percent in some Southern states. We are disenfranchising the victims of the war on drugs.”

Mr. Glasser’s book, Visions of Liberty: The Bill of Rights for All Americans, was published in November 1991 by Arcade Publishing, Inc. in New York City. An insightful analysis of how our rights developed, Visions was written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.

Mr. Glasser is a widely published essayist on civil liberties principles and issues whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, and Christianity and Crisis, among other publications. He is also the co-author of Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence, published by Pantheon in 1978.

Mr. Glasser received a B.S. degree in mathematics and graduated with honors in literature and the arts from Queens College in 1959. He has a master’s degree in mathematics from Ohio State University and also studied sociology and philosophy on the graduate level at the New School for Social Research.

Born and raised in New York, Mr. Glasser is married and the father of four children.